Obama Nominates Elena Kagan, Upsets The Left

This morning, Obama picked Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. Kagan is a woman who looks like Mike Myers from Austin Powers and has an even smaller paper trail than stealth candidate David Souter. She is a self-avowed liberal, but the left isn’t happy. And, truthfully, they have reason to be concerned. Indeed, Obama seems to have picked her because she's likely to be acceptable to the Republicans.

Let’s start with the obvious. Kagan checks off a lot of boxes. She’s female and Jewish, two of Obama’s biggest supporting groups. She’s rumored to be a lesbian, another Obama supporting group, though they prefer their candidates to be open. She’s also young, at 50, so she’s likely to stay on the court a long time.

So what does she stand for? Nobody knows, and that’s the problem.

She was a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall, one of the biggest dipsh*ts to ever sit on the Supreme Court. That’s bad. But she taught with Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, a supposedly conservative school. Her biggest achievement was becoming dean of the Harvard Law School (2003-2009), where she grabbed a little infamy for refusing to let military recruiters operate on campus because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, a policy put in place while she worked at the Clinton White House. She called the policy a “moral outrage.”

Sounds like a good leftist, right? Not so fast. When she was at Harvard, she garnered serious praise from conservatives for being quite fair to conservative groups at Harvard and by recruiting numerous conservatives for the Harvard faculty. This bothers the left a lot. What’s more, they are furious with her for hiring mostly white males (25 out of 32) during her tenure.

They are also upset with her actions vis-à-vis terror. At one point, she signed a letter opposing legislation proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (RINO-SC) to strip courts of the power to review detention practices at Guantanamo Bay, complaining that this law could be used to strip Americans of their legal rights and claiming that this is inconsistent with our government’s current and former criticism of dictatorships. This sounds liberal (though it's also consistent with libertarian thinking). But then, when she became Solicitor General, she took a different stance on this and has been roundly criticized by the left for advocating “Bush-lite.”

Beyond that, she has a scant paper trail, which is also upsetting the left a lot. She hasn’t taken any public stances on the nation’s more controversial issues over the past 20 years, despite the fact that few leftists have been able to shut their yaps on any issue during that time period.

Moreover, she has no legal record. In fact, 31 Republican Senators voted against her confirmation as Solicitor General because, not only has she never argued before the Supreme Court, she’s never argued before ANY COURT. (Her nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was shot down for that very reason.)

So no one knows what she stands for, which has actually generated a whisper campaign against her on the left. And you can see why they would be concerned. She may turn out to be everything the left wants, but it’s a gamble. And that’s making them furious since there are confirmed leftist candidates out there that could have been nominated instead.

Frankly, I think they have reason to worry. This is entirely speculation on my part, but I suspect the left will regret replacing Stevens with her. Stevens was a far-left lunatic. Kagan has shown through her time at Harvard and her adoption of “Bush-lite” that she’s much more reasonable and most likely center-left. She doesn’t seem to hate the right, like the fringe left does. She seems open to reason, and is not blind to ideology. And she seems to respect rule of law. Moreover, the fact that she would hire conservatives and wouldn’t whine constantly about the “evil Bush administration” makes me think that, at the least, she’s a liberal rather than a leftist, and she may even be a moderate liberal at that. If that’s the case, then Obama will have actually moved the court considerably to the right with this choice.

Still, who the heck knows?